Rebirth of Lutz depot inspires new book

"The Lutz Depot,'' by a mom-daughter team of local historicans, recounts the station's impact on the area.

By BILL COATS

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 2, 2000

LUTZ -- "The railroad literally put Lutz on the map."

Those words begin a new 80-page history book inspired by the rebuilding of Lutz's original train depot.

The Lutz Depot: Tales of the "TN," the "Pea Vine," Rail Line Mergers & Spunky Pioneers goes on sale Tuesday for $10 per copy. It is published by historian Elizabeth Riegler MacManus and her daughter, political scientist Susan A. MacManus.

The MacManuses are the same pair who 11/2 years ago produced the 544-page Citrus, Sawmills, Critters & Crackers, about life in early Lutz and Land O'Lakes. The University of Tampa Press sold the initial 1,000 copies and launched a second printing, Susan MacManus said.

Just before Citrus, Sawmills appeared, plans by Lutz civic leaders to rebuild the old depot began jelling and Elizabeth MacManus liked the proposal.

"Mama's been thinking about the book since they had the idea," Susan MacManus said.

As for the daughter's involvement, "Number one, I love my mother," she said. "And number two, I love Lutz."

So the MacManuses began digging through their voluminous files, interviewing long-time residents and visiting the Tampa Tribune and the Lutz Branch Library.

"From the beginning," they write on page 1, "the depot was the heart of the community -- where newcomers arrived and old-timers stayed in touch. Over the years, it served as the center of commerce and communication. It linked Lutz residents with the outside world, including Tampa, which in the early days seemed quite distant."

About the obsolete depot's 1966 demolition, they write, "it was to many old-timers as if the very heart and soul of Lutz had been ripped out."

As the two MacManus books explain, the area that became Lutz had only scattered settlements when the Tampa Northern Railroad came through the area in 1907, connecting Brooksville and Tampa. A depot was built where today's rail line passes 1st Avenue SW. But it was a nameless location where train engineers could resupply their wood-burning engines.

So one of the engineers, William Lutz, named the depot Lutz Station for himself. Two years later, his brother Charles Lutz built a small rail line from his sawmill in Odessa to Lutz Station. Charles Lutz renamed the spot Lutz Junction. His rail line wound so crookedly through the swamps that locals nicknamed it the Pea Vine.

Nobody planned to create a community called Lutz.

Instead, a group of Chicago investors, which had bought 50 square miles in the area, decided in 1910 to create a town called North Tampa at the railroad junction.

The company ran newspaper advertisements across the Midwest about an idyllic Florida community where lakes teemed with bass and groves were lush with citrus. Families moved their children, livestock and important possessions to North Tampa on the train. The first was Mike Riegler, father of Elizabeth MacManus.

By 1912, the town had 30 buildings and the school had 35 children. But it had no post office. When the government approved one in 1913, it rejected the name "North Tampa" as too easily confused with Tampa. Postal officials chose "Lutz," which had appeared on a map in 1909, a year before North Tampa was founded.

By then, the 6-year-old train depot already had received its first addition, enclosing the open platform on the northern end.

Lutz residents over the years ordered everything from appliances to fertilizer to baby chickens via rail. They shipped tons of fruit. At Christmas, they decorated gift bushels with bunches of kumquats and Spanish moss. In summer, children hovered nearby as watermelons were loaded into boxcars, hoping one would drop and burst.

Passengers could flag down a train with a handkerchief. The trains brought party-goers from Tampa to Lutz, where they would dance at two lakefront pavilions and sample local moonshine. During the Great Depression, hobos often clambered from boxcars in Lutz to plead for a meal at the nearest house.

By the 1960s, highways and trucks had made the Lutz Depot obsolete. The railroad obtained permission to demolish it.

The Lutz Civic Association, which this year has led the rebuilding project, endorsed the demolition back then, calling the depot an "eyesore." But others were more sentimental.

"I hate to see it go," one resident, Mrs. Raymond Nevel, told the Tampa Times for a 1965 article. "We've shipped fruit through it for 35 years, and I have a feeling for it."

- Bill Coats can be reached at (813) 226-3469 or coats@sptimes.com.

The Lutz Depot sells for $10 and can be ordered by calling Susan A. MacManus at (813) 974-5351. Citrus, Sawmills, Critters & Crackers can be ordered from the University of Tampa Press for $56, including taxes and shipping, by calling (813) 253-6266.

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